51–60 of 199 posts
But not all social media are the same. HN for example, is the only social media that I consume completely (news feeds + comment section). Everything else I limit as much as I can.. what makes HN so much better than the others? Lack of ads? Moderation?
I don't consider HN to be social media. It's a forum isn't it? Mostly anonymous and no "pushing" of feeds or content.
> Social media are interactive technologies that allow the creation or sharing/exchange of information, ideas, career interests, and other forms of expression via virtual communities and networks
Sounds like social media to me
There is simply too much noise/signal. We truly need a protected class of speech/news that cannot lie by law. This is similar to standardizing currency in order to facilitate trade without risk, except for information.
This begs the question that truth can be formalized. Who gets to decide what is truth? That's incredible power and it's unlikely that people will agree on who gets to wield it. If some does have that power, how do we know that they won't control the "truth" to build an autocracy?
Academia has been trying for centuries to crack this nut, and it is not easy.
There is simply too much noise/signal. We truly need a protected class of speech/news that cannot lie by law. This is similar to standardizing currency in order to facilitate trade without risk, except for information.
But who will be the arbiter of truth?
So, probably the courts. That's an imperfect solution, but it beats the hell out of the position that any attempt to arbitrate the truth is unacceptably oppressive.
On another level: everyone has an obligation to arbitrate the truth as honestly and ably as they're capable, in every domain they have responsibility for, first and foremost in training themselves to be more careful about their own blind spots, tendencies, incentives, and limits, and then in exercising whatever influence and authority they have.
There is simply too much noise/signal. We truly need a protected class of speech/news that cannot lie by law. This is similar to standardizing currency in order to facilitate trade without risk, except for information.
But who will be the arbiter of truth?
I 100% think that social media is shrinking our collective attention spans, and the cumulative effects of this are unpredictable. Infinitely scrolling through flashy, zero-effort "snackable" content is the equivalent of mental junk food.
There is simply too much noise/signal. We truly need a protected class of speech/news that cannot lie by law. This is similar to standardizing currency in order to facilitate trade without risk, except for information.
Human speech just doesn't lend itself to the type of formalism required for this to be possible. If you want the closest approximation, look at legal jargon, specifically for contracts: It is a set of speech standards that evolved over centuries in an effort to reduced ambiguity in transactions. As a result, it is extremely verbose to the point of incomprehensibility by outsiders, and it's still possible to deliberately misuse it without easy detection.
There is simply too much noise/signal. We truly need a protected class of speech/news that cannot lie by law. This is similar to standardizing currency in order to facilitate trade without risk, except for information.
Free speech is important for a free society, although we are moving away in recent years with all of the platform censorship and truth labeling. While this censorship is technically legal, these platforms are used like public land and are training generations of people to undervalue freedom of expression.
People look at social media but it started waaay earlier, back in old Mesopotamia.
Mesopotamic Urbanization>Ability to write>Journals>Newspapers>Radio>TV>Internet>Social Media
Social media is just the last step in the process. Each and every step of the process contributed to make humans learn about how many humans are there in the world and this somehow makes us feel less special.
When we wrap our minds around how many humans are there in the world, we feel insignificant and we feel like we don't matter at all. In a sense our sense of worth feels diluted by the immense quanity of people who are just like us.
This creates anxiety and resentment. Our brain is still the same as we had back in pre-Mesopotamic eras.